New blog entry: More in Sadness than in Anger: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2026/02/more-in-sadness-than-in-anger.html
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@cstross While I am in France, I still fall short of that. There again, there’s a joke in there about guillotines and falling short.
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@cstross It seems the solution to the question the billionaires ask is to take their ill-gotten gains and redistribute the money so everyone has a decent standard of living.
@feorag I suspect that when it eventually comes to that, you'd be lucky to get 5% from the liquidation.
At least the $1bn ballroom could be used as a warehouse, but even then it's probably got terrible transport links.
An awful lot of the "money" is either in the form of objects which are expensive to make but of limited utility to non-billionaires, or largely illusory -- how much is Tesla actually worth as a company, if there's no billionaires to buy it? Probably not the current market cap.
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Footnote: the outcome of the Epstein/Gates email itself is immaterial—what's interesting is the mind set underlying it, which seems to have strong explanatory power for our current mess: there are too many poor people, and Epstein and his mates would like to get rid of us.
@cstross I wouldn't put anything past Epstein, but Gates has given enough evidence of somewhat-benevolent intentions that I'd at least _consider_ the possibility that he just picked a very bad way of saying "how do we get rid of _poverty_?".
I too would like a world in which there are no poor people, provided we can get there by making the currently-poor people not-poor and stopping new people becoming poor, rather than killing existing poor people and preventing anyone being born who might turn out poor.
(Of course there might be elements of both. It could be that Gates genuinely wants to eliminate poverty but some bit of his brain wants to do it because poor people are an untidy nuisance rather than to benefit those people, and sometimes that leaks out into his words, and all that could be true even if he wouldn't ever actually go for mass murder as the, er, final solution to the problem of poverty.)
Obligatory link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE
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New blog entry: More in Sadness than in Anger: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2026/02/more-in-sadness-than-in-anger.html
@cstross and that’s why I’m an anarchist. System needs a reboot with a degaussing for good measure.
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Footnote: the outcome of the Epstein/Gates email itself is immaterial—what's interesting is the mind set underlying it, which seems to have strong explanatory power for our current mess: there are too many poor people, and Epstein and his mates would like to get rid of us.
@cstross So, Mitchell & Webb were prescient? https://youtu.be/s_4J4uor3JE
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New blog entry: More in Sadness than in Anger: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2026/02/more-in-sadness-than-in-anger.html
@cstross The problem is not the billionaires, in a democracy it's the most numerous who win, not the richest. The reason the left almost always loses is purely self-harm and splittism for instance: https://bsky.app/profile/georgemonbiot.bsky.social/post/3mfcdb62pp22r the left has been doing this to itself since the 1917 March revolution. Fix the left instead of going "booho billionaires rule both parties". Hitler himself won in large part because of "nach Hitler kommt wir" ideas of the communists.
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@cstross Glad that more and more people realize that the oligarchy wants to kill us. I thought I was going crazy. But billion of deaths is consistent with their vision of a livable planet destabilized by an out-of-control climate.
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@cstross The problem is not the billionaires, in a democracy it's the most numerous who win, not the richest. The reason the left almost always loses is purely self-harm and splittism for instance: https://bsky.app/profile/georgemonbiot.bsky.social/post/3mfcdb62pp22r the left has been doing this to itself since the 1917 March revolution. Fix the left instead of going "booho billionaires rule both parties". Hitler himself won in large part because of "nach Hitler kommt wir" ideas of the communists.
@cstross why not study the countries where the moderate left actually won? E.g. Scandinavia, the moderates were very brutal in excluding the nutcases. Lots of bad blood on the left to this day.
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Footnote: the outcome of the Epstein/Gates email itself is immaterial—what's interesting is the mind set underlying it, which seems to have strong explanatory power for our current mess: there are too many poor people, and Epstein and his mates would like to get rid of us.
The fact that Gates wanted to give his wife STD medication without her knowledge tells you everything you need to know about Microsoft's and the tech industry's approach to consent.
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Footnote: the outcome of the Epstein/Gates email itself is immaterial—what's interesting is the mind set underlying it, which seems to have strong explanatory power for our current mess: there are too many poor people, and Epstein and his mates would like to get rid of us.
@cstross And the thing to understand about being "poor", is that that includes everything up to the very tippy top of upper middle class!!
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@cstross The problem is not the billionaires, in a democracy it's the most numerous who win, not the richest. The reason the left almost always loses is purely self-harm and splittism for instance: https://bsky.app/profile/georgemonbiot.bsky.social/post/3mfcdb62pp22r the left has been doing this to itself since the 1917 March revolution. Fix the left instead of going "booho billionaires rule both parties". Hitler himself won in large part because of "nach Hitler kommt wir" ideas of the communists.
@trademark Democracy does not run on victory to the most numerous these days, it runs on victory to the most indoctrinated. Which goes with the money.
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Footnote: the outcome of the Epstein/Gates email itself is immaterial—what's interesting is the mind set underlying it, which seems to have strong explanatory power for our current mess: there are too many poor people, and Epstein and his mates would like to get rid of us.
@cstross
It is the intersection of the degrees of selfishness & foresightedness. If your level of selfishness is "the good of all mankind" you want to eliminate poverty by giving everyone enough food, accomodation, etc; if "me and my family" you get traditional aristocratic behaviour; if "me & nobody else" you treat everyone else as objects, which can be disposed of at your whim- mass disposal of the poor on a par with a neat close-cropped lawn. -
@cstross The problem is not the billionaires, in a democracy it's the most numerous who win, not the richest. The reason the left almost always loses is purely self-harm and splittism for instance: https://bsky.app/profile/georgemonbiot.bsky.social/post/3mfcdb62pp22r the left has been doing this to itself since the 1917 March revolution. Fix the left instead of going "booho billionaires rule both parties". Hitler himself won in large part because of "nach Hitler kommt wir" ideas of the communists.
@trademark @cstross In the 2025 Reith lecture, Rutger Bregman makes the point that if somebody agrees with you 70%, that person ought to be your ally. The left is demanding levels of purity far, far higher and that harms their position.
Look at Evangelical Fundamentalists and Tech Bros. They have about as much in common as (as you mentioned Hitler) the German Adel had with the Socialist part of the NSDAP. Their only common goal was to get rid of the democratic institutions. That's not even close to 70% agreement.
So, how can the Left get jointly behind the idea of saving the western democratic model instead of bickering with the people's front of Judea? -
New blog entry: More in Sadness than in Anger: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2026/02/more-in-sadness-than-in-anger.html
@cstross
IIRC per your journal you've previously come to the conclusion that the planet is about 100% beyond its maximum sustainable carrying capacity (given our current tech base).
It appears that they may agree. -
@trademark @cstross In the 2025 Reith lecture, Rutger Bregman makes the point that if somebody agrees with you 70%, that person ought to be your ally. The left is demanding levels of purity far, far higher and that harms their position.
Look at Evangelical Fundamentalists and Tech Bros. They have about as much in common as (as you mentioned Hitler) the German Adel had with the Socialist part of the NSDAP. Their only common goal was to get rid of the democratic institutions. That's not even close to 70% agreement.
So, how can the Left get jointly behind the idea of saving the western democratic model instead of bickering with the people's front of Judea?@jsl @trademark You're missing nuances not specific to the US (you mentioned a Reith lecture!). Here in the UK, the Labour party is de facto politically the Conservative party of 20 years ago: they're absolutely not remotely on the left any more, and they're pursuing dangerously authoritarian policies in many areas. I submit that it's not "purity" to oppose Tories in pink ties, it's realism.
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@cstross
IIRC per your journal you've previously come to the conclusion that the planet is about 100% beyond its maximum sustainable carrying capacity (given our current tech base).
It appears that they may agree.@SoftwareTheron No, our planet is beyond its *long term* carrying capacity. We've already passed peak birth rate and even without pandemics or billionaire-induced genocide there will be more than a billion fewer people on earth in 2126 than there are in 2026. It's a self-correcting problem within a period of a couple of centuries, and we can probably survive that long on our current tech base.
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@SoftwareTheron No, our planet is beyond its *long term* carrying capacity. We've already passed peak birth rate and even without pandemics or billionaire-induced genocide there will be more than a billion fewer people on earth in 2126 than there are in 2026. It's a self-correcting problem within a period of a couple of centuries, and we can probably survive that long on our current tech base.
@cstross @SoftwareTheron we could also do a lot of things a lot cheaper if we actually assigned the costs properly. Excess air travel would be self correcting if it had to cover the full costs for example.
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@cstross And the thing to understand about being "poor", is that that includes everything up to the very tippy top of upper middle class!!
@GinevraCat @cstross And that includes "upper middle class" as defined in any reasonable sense of the phrase - having to work for a living, but able to absorb serious medical expenses or extended disability, or take vacations in more pleasant times - which includes, in the USA, anyone with an annual income under around $300K.
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@GinevraCat @cstross And that includes "upper middle class" as defined in any reasonable sense of the phrase - having to work for a living, but able to absorb serious medical expenses or extended disability, or take vacations in more pleasant times - which includes, in the USA, anyone with an annual income under around $300K.
@callisto @GinevraCat Yep. The gap between a billionaire and a mere millionaire is vastly bigger than the gap between average-middle-class and a millionaire.
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New blog entry: More in Sadness than in Anger: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2026/02/more-in-sadness-than-in-anger.html
@cstross Eat the rich before they eat us.
